Monday, September 28, 2015

Drools 6.3.0.Final released

Posted by
Edson Tirelli

Drools 6.3.0.Final has been released.

This release continues with the focus on extending and improving the platform that we have followed for the 6.x series. Bellow you can read about the highlights of the release but here are some important links:

Release Highlights

Real Time Validation and Verification for the Decision Tables

Decision tables used to have a Validation-button for validating the table. This is now removed and the table is validated after each cell value change. The validation and verification checks include:

Redundancy

Subsumption

Conflicts

Missing Columns

Improved DRL Editor

The DRL Editor has undergone a face lift; moving from a plain TextArea to using ACE Editor and a custom DRL syntax highlighter.

Browsing graphs of objects with OOPath

When the field of a fact is a collection it is possible to bind and reason over all the items in that collection on by one using the from keyword. Nevertheless, when it is required to browse a graph of object the extensive use of the from conditional element may result in a verbose and cumbersome syntax.

By borrowing ideas from XPath, this syntax can be made more succinct, as XPath has a compact notation for navigating through related elements while handling collections and filtering constraints. This XPath-inspired notation has been called OOPath since it is explictly intended to browse graph of objects.

Kie Navigator View for Eclipse

A new viewer has been added to the Eclipse Tooling. This Kie Navigator View is used to manage Kie Server installations and projects.

Generation of JPA enabled Data Models

Data modeller was extended to support the generation of persistable Data Objects. The persistable Data Objects are based on the JPA specification and all the underlying metadata are automatically generated.

Data Set Authoring

A new perspective for authoring data set definitions has been added. Data set definitions make it possible to retrieve data from external systems like databases, CSV/Excel files or even use a Java class to generate the data. Once the data is available it can be used, for instance, to create charts and dashboards from the Perspective Editor just feeding the charts from any of the data sets available.

Consolidated Kie Server (execution server): Rules and Processes

A lot of work went into the creation of unified, highly configurable, minimal execution server - ideal for cloud-based or micro-services architectures. Since v6.0 the workbench has included an execution server that could be accessed remotely. This was however embedded into the workbench and designed to operate in a symmetric way when deployed in a clustered environment (all nodes in the cluster were able to execute all processes / requests). In Drools v.6.2 a new minimal decision service was introduced that allows only deploying specific rule sets to specific containers, giving the user full control over deployment. This has now been unified, resulting in a lightweight execution server where you can execute your processes, rules, tasks and async jobs. It can be set up as a single execution server for all your projects, or different execution server instances (possibly one for each project).